Product spotlight: The Glue Looper

Last June, I picked up The Glue Looper at the Bead&Button Show and had been waiting for a good opportunity to use it.

Recently, the magnetic clasp on a necklace of mine broke. The magnet needed to be reattached to the finding. During the same week, the tip of the tail of my beloved ceramic fish that I use to hold my scrubbies at my kitchen sink broke off. Opportunity knocks!

The Glue Looper is a micro glue applicator that works by capillary action like a quill pen and self-regulates the amount of glue that is dispersed. It can be used in any hobby handle, so I loaded mine into an X-Acto knife holder. There are two different styles of applicators, one for thin glues (V4) and one for thick glues (V3), and both come in three different sizes.

The company, Creative Dynamic LLC, also sells thick (M1100G) and thin (Mercury M5T) glues to go along with the tool. However, they can be used with any glue. Examples of the thick glues include gels, epoxy (e6000), and white glue. Thin glues, or low viscosity glues, would be something along the lines of super glue. I used the thin glue and applicator to fix the magnetic clasp and the thick glue and applicator to fix the ceramic fish.

I put some glue on the top of my water bottle cap as described in the video and then dipped the top of The Glue Looper into the glue. A dot appeared just as described. I plopped it right in the hole and popped the magnet on top, let it dry and it was good as new. It was a tiny little hole, so it would have been terribly difficult to target that small space without The Glue Looper. However, I did find myself doubting if it was really working because it was so hard to see. (It was.)

The fish was a little more difficult to repair because there was more than one piece of ceramic to rebuild. I chose to glue it in stages. I glued one piece, then waited a day, then added the next piece just to make sure it was dry. That process was probably overkill, but I really wanted it to work. The Glue Looper allowed a high level of control to apply the glue into crevasses. However, each new day, I had to light the looper up with a lighter to burn the old glue off. It was a new process for me.

I found The Glue Looper to be really handy to have for these repairs. I know that it is building popularity with our model-building friends, too, since The Glue Looper was funded as a Kickstarter project targeted to that community. They love that V4 can be used with precision for very small parts.